"If the world were a logical place, Mitt Romney would be president by now. I'm sure that's what he thinks – or that is what the chips in his circuit board tell him. His business background in the context of America's financial meltdown should have won him the Republican nomination in 2008 – seriously, John McCain? Seriously? – and his mixed-marriage political history (as the conservative governor of a liberal state) could have given him a fighting chance against any Democratic nominee. The logic of that equation is so strong, and Romney and his team are so helpless in the face of logic, that they appear to be running for the 2012 GOP nomination as if all of that worked out the first time.

How else to explain the slow, easy lope Romney is taking around the primary states, refusing to look hurried or even like he's campaigning? It's true that, for decades, Republican primary voters have tended to nominate the person "next in line", and this year, Romney has that distinction. Such behaviour is less the product of analysis (looking who has the most experience, who has been working on getting the nomination the longest) than it is of name recognition. In any poll more than a year out from an election, most voters will simply gravitate toward the familiar. Romney's precipitous fall from first place in current polling – Texas Governor Rick Perry, a newcomer to the national stage, has catapulted to the lead – suggests revisions to the conventional wisdom about the GOP primary both general and specific.

First, if outspoken outliers such as Perry and Bachmann (and even McCain, in his own way) continue to do well in the modern Republican party, there is no longer a "next in line" theory of nominations. And, specifically to Romney, there's this: voters' familiarity with his name has failed to make him especially loved: of the announced presidential candidates, Romney has the highest name recognition but lowest "positive intensity" score, as tracked by Gallup. Mitt Romney belongs to a select group of politicians that fails to excite the emotions of the population either direction. (His fellow hopefuls, however, experience no such ambivalence: they loathe him.)

There is a name for this set of candidates: losers. Pundits' predictions that Romney's New England ties – he owns a summer home in New Hampshire in addition to having served in neighbouring Massachusetts – will clinch him the New Hampshire primary seem to gloss over the failure of those ties to make much of a difference in 2008. New Hampshire voters knew Mitt Romney then, and refused to vote for him. (Hint: pundits who think having a summer home in a state connects a politician to voters probably have spent too much time in their own vacation manses.)

Now, it's true: affable technocrats can win elections. In times of national crisis, a nation may turn its world-weary eyes to a Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover, hoping for a term of office as blessedly free from excitement as the candidate is. Indeed, faced with the riling rhetoric and accompanying dust storm of publicity accompanying Perry, conservative intellectuals such as David Brooks and Reihan Salam pine for the soothing wet-blanket anti-charisma of Romney, or – are you sitting down? Because you might fall asleep after this – of Indiana Governor and budget policy wonk Mitch Daniels.

Ultimately, though, voters in this election cycle already have a monotone, calculating and slightly animatronic candidate in the mix: his name is Barack Obama, who has sacrificed the soaring oratory of his 2008 run for the more mundane business of seeing the country through recession, natural disaster and endless wars. Republican voters, in their predilection (so far) for hell-raisers, have rejected the competent, contraction-free otherworldliness of Romney. At his angriest and most out of control, Romney spouts such intemperate remarks as "corporations are people!" and, revealingly, "You've had your turn, madam; now let me get mine!"

He may be waiting for a while.

• This article was amended on 30 August 2011 because the original said Mitch Daniels was an Indiana senator. This has been corrected.